Guest review by Graeme Fife: UNCLE SILAS by Sheridan Le Fanu

"How tricks and illusions undercut a sense of reality, the deliberate attempt to disturb the balance of a rational mind ..."

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. Great Cycling Climbs, which brings together his books on the French Alps, is published by Thames and Hudson. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.'

Le Fanu’s best-known novel, Uncle Silas, concludes with what may stand as a central fixation in his work, framed by the protagonist and narrator of the novel, Maud:

‘This world is a parable – the habitation of symbols – the phantoms of spiritual things immortal shown in material shape.’

The statement might read as a lofty philosophical animadversion on Nature’s mysteries and the unexplained phenomena of the universe whereas, in this context, it delves into the darker corners and impulses of the human psyche, the machinations of the unprincipled, the bid to influence, manipulate and subdue the innocent. Deceit, deception, undermining trust become instruments of domination. But…slow down, you horses of the night, we must tread more circumspectly.

Ann Radcliff, author of a number of Gothic novels, ushered in a new genre of fiction which extended interest in the mind’s darker impulses. Sophocles’s introduction of the third character in tragedy, Webster’s obsession with ‘the skull beneath the skin’, Hamlet’s ‘more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ laid the groundwork. Romantic poets deepened the theme of spiritual torment and angst, the irresistible lure of ‘the dark tower’, and the Victorian novelists ran riot with all the possibilities that these new areas of insight opened up, from Hogg’s Justified Sinner to the shivery crime novels of Wilkie Collins. Le Fanu is part of that coterie of writers whose work is forged in the inquiry into how tricks and illusions undercut a sense of reality, the deliberate attempt to disturb the balance of a rational mind, a sinister interference with a fragile psyche as a prelude to betrayal, fraud, incarceration, violence.

The effect of these scary workings is to instil terror, causing such a radical shift in the foundation of what a character believes to be so that they cease to have any firm grip on what is actually so. Radcliff draws a distinction between terror – perhaps what the character in the novel experiences – and horror, the effect of that on the reader:

‘Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.’ (On the Supernatural)…terror, ‘dread, fright,’ and horror, the bristling of nape hairs.

Le Fanu is a master at inciting both.

Maud, protected by a reclusive, gloomy father, is a motherless heiress. She tells the story of how she comes to live in the remote Derbyshire home of her uncle, Silas, once a notorious rake, now converted to pious Christianity. And which does she see? Who he was or who he has become? The household is also home to a dissolute male cousin, a simpleton of a female cousin, a dodgy servant with a peg leg, a virago of a French governess. The sombre mansion, Bartram-Haugh, in vast parkland - mists at dawn and dusk, eerie noises and flitting movements, essentials of Le Fanu’s atmospherics – contributes to the vivid painting of scene, a very cinematic trope, much favoured in fiction of the time. There was fog, they used fog. And fog as symbol, because the conspiracy to deprive Maud of her wealth hinges on befogging her so that she is at sea, uncertain of where solid grounding is.

Her father dies. Now she is alone and unprotected, tied by a promise to remain a guest of Silas for three and a half years, until she achieves her maturity. If she dies in that time, the money goes to Silas. Her father appears to her in a dream (hallucination?):

‘This night my dear father’s face troubled me – sometimes white and sharp as ivory, sometimes strangely transparent like glass, sometimes all hanging in cadaverous folds, always with the same unnatural expression of diabolical fury. From this dreadful vision I could only escape by sitting up and staring at the light.’

She does, eventually, fall asleep, but in a dream hears her father’s voice, distinctly ‘outside the bed-curtain: “Maud, we shall be late at Bartram-Haugh.”’

Outside the bed-curtain…she’s confined in a four-poster, vulnerable, a prey to what prowls beyond it, and now what is she to believe of what she sees and hears? There is even passing reference to Bluebeard at one point.

Forewarned by whisper, enigmatic comment and her own intuition, she manages to evade the attempt to overpower her – with drugged claret – and watches, from a hiding place, the murder of a victim intended to be her.

It ends…but you must see how, and then move on, perhaps, to Wylders Hand.

Uncle Silas is published by Penguin Classics; Wylders Hand is published by Clean Bright Classics.

Guest review by Stephanie Butland: THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON by Sara Collins

"A clever and complex book that reads simply and engagingly, and demands the reader’s whole heart and mind."

Stephanie Butland is the author of four published novels, most recently  Lost for Words and The Curious Heart Of Ailsa Rae.  The Woman In The Photograph will be published by Zaffre in July. Stephanie lives in the north-east of England, near the sea; when she’s not writing she walks, knits, bakes, and, of course, reads. She also runs writing retreats. The best place to find her is on Twitter @under_blue_sky

April is early to make the call for Favourite Book Of the Year but I’ve committed myself, with The Confessions of Frannie Langton. And this from the woman who knows herself to be the one who will finally heal the heart of Jackson Brodie. (Big Sky is going to be equal first at best. This is unheard of in my world, where Jackson reigns supreme.) 

I was lucky enough to read an early proof of this book. (By ‘lucky’, I mean: I publicly begged the editor for one, on Twitter, and she took pity on me.) It arrived: I started reading it that afternoon, then into the night, got up the next morning, made tea, went back to bed, and kept turning the pages until I was finished. There just didn’t seem to be anything more important in my day than reading on. It’s been a long time since a book took hold of me like that.

One of the disadvantages of being a novelist is that it’s difficult to get really immersed in a book; almost impossible to be transported in the way you are when you’re ‘only’ that most important of things, a reader. I read amazing books and think, ‘Wow! - I see what you did there’ or ‘How cleverly you have picked up those threads’. Sara Collins’ writing reconnected me with the sheer pleasure of being carried along by a story; she’s written a clever and complex book that reads simply and engagingly, and demands the reader’s whole heart and mind.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton is the eponymous heroine’s account of her life, from growing up on a plantation in Jamaica to working as a maid in a grand house in London. Frannie is on trial for the murder of her master and mistress, and not even she knows whether she has committed the crimes of which she is accused. We follow Frannie’s life story, from learning to read to standing in the dock, in a tale that is part Gothic mystery, part character study, and part reflection on what we need to do, or be, in the world to make ourselves heard. It’s a history which is vivid and bold, and in our heroine we have a woman with a heartbreaking awareness of exactly how free she can ever hope to be. I felt for Frannie every step of the way.

If you’ve ever stayed up late with a Sarah Waters novel, if Jane Eyre is a book that you never tire of, if you’re a Margaret Atwood fan, then this book is definitely one for you. But I’d like to see it being read more widely than that.

I could not stop thinking about this book after I’d finished it, and it took me a while to work out why. It’s because it feels, to me, like something greater than a good read. It’s also an important book in these complicated times, reminding us of both how far the world has come and how little it has changed.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton is published by Viking. 

THE ESSEX SERPENT by Sarah Perry, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"This complex, satisfying portrayal of characters poised on the brink of the modern age is held together by a fresh and exhilarating sense of place and atmosphere."

The 1890s: a wealthy young widow moving to a new location; a village haunted by fear and superstition; sea-mists and strange effects of moonlight; experiments with hypnotism; the dread of tuberculosis; exchanges of letters to advance the plot - you might think you're in familiar territory here. But there is nothing hackneyed about Sarah Perry's handling of her materials.

The Essex Serpent takes us through a year, mainly in a rural community near the river Blackwater in Essex, and partly in London. On the first morning of the year a naked drowned man is found at the river's edge, his neck oddly twisted; this tragedy sets rumours flying of goats killed in the night, inexplicable stirrings in dark water and supernatural punishments for collective guilt, all of which the local vicar tries to combat with reassurances and prayers.

Sarah Perry's characters spring from the page. The reader is soon enamoured of Cora Seaborne; newly released from an unhappy and even abusive marriage, she is no victim, but an energetic, independent and fiercely honest woman with a passion for fossil-hunting, drawn to Aldwinter by the serpent rumours. Could it be a living fossil, an ichthyosaurus that has somehow survived into the modern age? (I've only recently read and reviewed Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures, whose heroine Mary Anning is frequently referred to here as an inspiration for Cora - viewed from the other side of Darwinism, as it were, more than fifty years after her astonishing finds.) Cora's free-thinking is matched by that of her companion, Martha, a socialist, who is acutely aware of class divisions and the inadequacy of London housing.

In a recent Guardian interview, Sarah Perry said that she aimed for 'a version of the 19th century that, if you blinked, looked a little like ours. I wanted to write a version of the Victorian age that wasn’t a theme park of peasoupers and street urchins. The more I looked, the more I found that not a great deal has changed – an ineffectual parliament, the power of big business and the insecurity around housing. And contemporary Conservatism going back to this idea that morality and poverty are in some way linked.' Martha tells a wealthy acquaintance. "We are punishing poverty ... If you are poor, or miserable, and behave as you might well expect a poor and miserable person to behave, since there's precious little else to pass the time, then your sentence is more misery, and more poverty." She saw 'his wealth and privilege coat him like furs'.

For all the novel's skilful plotting, with many well-drawn minor characters playing their part, the relationships seem to have the unpredictability of real life. Cora's experience of marriage has not inclined her to look for a new partner, yet she inspires love in at least three others, including the married clergyman Will Ransome. Although she and Will disagree on almost very point of faith and reason, he admires her as a sparring partner, and seeks her out for conversation. Cora's autistic son Francis, withdrawn, absorbed in his collections of strange objects, finds affinity with Will's consumptive wife and her obsession with the colour blue. Luke Garrett, a young surgeon who is central to the London part of the plot, is in love with Cora and quickly jealous of her affection for Will. The criss-crossing of relationships - the children's as well as the adults' - keeps the reader guessing to the end, as does the question of whether the serpent really exists. I hoped it wouldn't - but no spoilers.

This complex, satisfying portrayal of characters poised on the brink of the modern age is held together by a fresh and exhilarating sense of place and atmosphere. There's relish and even black humour in Sarah Perry's descriptions of the river and marshes: '... something alters in a turn of the tide or a change of the air; the estuary surface shifts - seems (he steps forward) to pulse and throb, then grow slick and still; then soon after to convulse, as if flinching at a touch. Nearer he goes, not yet afraid; the gulls lift off one by one, and the last gives a scream of dismay.'

And I shall certainly be looking out for noctiluminescence in late summer skies.